Discovery at UH Opens Doors for Our Patients

Q: University Hospitals is a national leader in research, where discoveries are not only made, but new therapies that have taken years to develop are finally tested in patients. To what do you attribute this success?

A: The bottom line is that we have a terrific, aggressive group of researchers who are very interested in bringing new drugs, devices and cell-based therapies to our patients. Our physician-scientists and PhD scientists are relentlessly focused on taking discoveries from the bench to the bedside. Their goal is simple — to improve patient care and clinical outcomes. We are also innovators in how we conduct and enroll patients in clinical trials. For instance, we have one of only two mobile research units in the U.S. that travels into urban and rural communities, helping us to bring hope to patients and their families who in the past had difficulty participating in a clinical study. Take, for example, the amazing work of Grace McComsey, MD, Vice President of the UH Clinical Research Center and the Rainbow Babies & Children’s Foundation John Kennell Chair of Excellence in Pediatrics, among other roles. She leads the nation in recruiting patients and, particularly under-represented minoritized patients, to participate in the large federally funded RECOVER study on long COVID. It’s a testament to the power of Dr. McComsey and the ingenuity of her Clinical Research Center team that we were able to lead enrollment despite the difficulties of conducting research during the pandemic.

Q: How will the recently expanded Wesley Center for Immunotherapy at UH Seidman Cancer Center make a measurable difference for our cancer patients?

A: The Wesley Center for Immunotherapy is a new state-of-the-art facility that will enhance our ability to produce cell-based therapies for cancer and non-cancer indications. It’s expanding the types of cancers that we treat. Cell-based therapies like CAR T have typically been used to treat patients with lymphoma and leukemia. We now have a new protocol for treating multiple myeloma that’s attracting patients from all over the U.S. The Wesley Center is also aggressively moving forward with solid tumor CAR T-cell applications for head and neck, prostate, pancreas and breast cancer. Importantly, the Wesley Center for Immunotherapy allows us to continue to accelerate new therapies for non-cancer indications such as osteoarthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.

Discovery at UH Opens Doors for Our Patients

Q: UH has unique collaborative relationships with other research institutions around the world, such as our relationship with the University of Oxford. How does this lead to better outcomes for our patients?

A: We live in a global world, and many medical technologies are developed and approved for clinical use in other countries before the U.S. UH has made a commitment to be on the leading edge of international research collaborations to help develop and study new drugs and devices wherever they may be. One great example of this comes from my own specialty of interventional cardiology. UH’s global reach and the research relationships we had in Portugal and Sicily allowed our UH Harrington Heart & Vascular team to be trained on emerging minimally invasive technology for catheter-based aortic valve replacement in the awake and talking patient. By training in Europe, we were able to play a leading role in clinical trials here in the U.S. In fact, we used those devices here at UH for four years before they were ever approved by the FDA, to the great benefit of our patients in Northeast Ohio and beyond.

Another example includes our effort with the Oxford-Harrington Rare Disease Centre through the Harrington Discovery Institute. This affiliation gives us a global collaboration with the number one ranked research university in the world seven years in a row – the institution responsible for developing and licensing the technology that vaccinated 3.5 billion patients globally against COVID-19. Working with institutions like this is transformative for UH, especially in new gene therapy and base correction approaches for rare diseases in children and adults. There’s no question that the versatility of our research relationships – the wide number, the varying locations from Asia to the Middle East to Europe to South America – provide us with access to the best for our patients in our community. Everybody benefits.